While Vigil’s WH40K MMO, Dark Millennium Online, will be “quite similar” to traditional MMOs, the game is looking to innovate at its most basic level, executive producer Tim Campbell told RPS at gamesom last week.

“Where we want to innovate is in the basic, moment-to-moment gameplay,” said Campbell.

“The first thing we realised is that if you try to do traditional MMO combat with guns, it doesn’t work. You have, like, a tank with a gun? It doesn’t make sense. And because the IP is really visceral and powerful, we wanted to amp the action up. So, it’s much more action-based. But we don’t want to talk about that just yet.”

“It doesn’t play like an MMO”

Campbell said DMO is easily identifiable compared to other MMOs on the most immediate, visual level.

“You can spot an MMO from forty feet away,” he added. “There’s something about ‘em. They’ve got a million buttons, and you target enemies and attack them, and the whole thing is so easily identifiable.

“But because of our presentation and interface, if you walked by our game on the show floor, you wouldn’t think it was an MMO. At that level, it doesn’t play like an MMO.”

Vehicles in MMOs are rubbish

During the interview, Campbell also touched a bit on the vehicular combat, seen the game’s trailers, which he called one of “the pillars” of the game.

“Vehicles in MMOs are usually pretty poorly implemented,” he said.

“You can’t get out, there’s no real physics. But the vehicles in our game, you can jump in and out, they react to the environment. I mean it’s not like, super-hardcore physics, you can’t really crash the vehicles.

“I’d call it ‘part-physics,’ if that makes sense. You can still ram other vehicles and stuff, but you can’t tip over.”